SCIENCE VERSUS THE HEALTH OF PATIENTS.

SCIENCE VERSUS THE HEALTH OF PATIENTS. The argument for requiring randomized clinical trials is that this is the “gold standard” for science. (I note that there are those, such as Ziliak and Teather Posadas, who do not agree with that proposition.) A difficulty is that in medicine the interests of patients should be taken into account. Randomized clinical trials take a long time. If the drug is a good drug, patients in the control group and patients who will not be given the benefits of the drug until the trial is concluded will suffer a loss. They will be in the position of the Chinese students with poor eye sight who had to wait for the conclusion of the study before they could have eyeglasses.

I think that the decision on whether a randomized clinical trial is best should depend on the facts, which seems to be the position taken by the proposed legislation (which was approved unanimously in the relevant House committee.)